Some traditional processors are configured such that memory access addresses are to be aligned on a natural alignment boundary. These boundaries define “words” stored in the memory which may be used to improve efficiency in handling data by the processors. However, in some instances data may be requested that it is not aligned on the natural alignment boundaries in the memory. For instance, data may be stored in memory such that it spans multiple words, e.g., a most significant bit and a least significant bit of the data are stored using different words in the memory.
Traditional techniques to align data access, however, were inefficient and consumed valuable resources, e.g., processor and/or software resources. Therefore, traditional processors that are optimized to process data aligned on natural alignment boundaries (e.g., for words) may suffer a significant performance penalty when unaligned data is requested.